The Alchemist - Jorge Angel Livraga Rizzi

This is the exciting story of a young chemist, Pablo Simón, a member of a Hermetic Lodge of Catholics who, in the midst of the terrors of the Inquisition, are working in obscurity to preserve the wisdom of the ages and to live out their Master's message of love.

Forced to flee his town in order to escape from the Holy Office, Pablo Simón undertakes a journey to the East. In India he is to find the key to the Occult Science, but the magic of that land holds him there, causing him to forget the reason for his journey. Until one day when he meets the man who in the West is called Giordano Bruno, a man whom the Church has been persecuting to prevent him from spreading doctrines which pose a threat to its dogmas, and whom Pablo Simón had seen in his dreams, a man who is to show him an answer to his quest.

Pablo Simón returns with him to Europe, stopping in Egypt, the fatherland of Hermeticism. Then he rejoins the Brotherhood and takes up his work again. But his enemies continue to stalk him.

The sentencing of Giordano Bruno causes a spring of hatred to well up in his heart: this is the final test on his path and he is on the point of failing...But the training he has received in the schools of the East and West save him from falling into the trap. His destiny is marked out and so he continues in the footsteps of his master Giordano Bruno and so many other philosophers of the 16th century, victims of the ignorance and fanaticism of their age.